shimmer, and the wide
landscape, brown with its violet edging, stood out with a hard clearness
in that dry, pure air. The long caravan straggled along at the slow
swing of the baggage-camels. Far out on the flanks rode the vedettes,
halting at every rise, and peering backwards with their hands shading
their eyes. In the distance their spears and rifles seemed to stick out
of them, straight and thin, like needles in knitting.

"How far do you suppose we are from the Nile?" asked Cochrane. He rode
with his chin on his shoulder and his eyes straining wistfully to the
eastern sky-line.

"A good fifty miles," Belmont answered.

"Not so much as that," said the Colonel. "We could not have been moving
more than fourteen or fifteen hours, and a camel seldom goes more than
two and a half miles an hour unless he is trotting. That would give
about forty miles, but still it is, I fear, rather far for a rescue. I
don't know that we are much the better for this postponement. What have
we to hope for? We may just as well take our gruel."

"Never say die!" cried the cheery Irishman. "There's plenty of time
between this and mid-day. Hamilton and Hedley of the Camel Corps are
good boys, and they'll be after us like a streak. They'll have no
baggage-camels to hold them back, you can lay your life on that! Little
did I think, when I dined with them at mess that last night, and they
were telling me all their precautions against a raid, that I should
depend upon them for our lives."

"Well, we'll play the game out, but I'm not very hopeful," said
Cochrane. "Of course, we must keep the best face we can before the
women. I see that Tippy Tilly is as good as his word, for those five
niggers and the two brown Johnnies must be the men he speaks of. They
all ride together and keep well up, but I can't see how they are going
to help us."

"I've got my pistol back," whispered Belmont, and his square chin and
strong mouth set like granite. "If they try any games on the women, I
mean to shoot them all three with my own hand, and then we'll die with
our minds easy."

"Good man!" said Cochrane, and they rode on in silence. None of them
spoke much. A curious, dreamy, irresponsible feeling crept over them.
It was as if they had all taken some narcotic drug--the merciful anodyne
which Nature uses when a great crisis has fretted the nerves too
far. They thought of their friends and of their past lives in the
comprehensive way in which one views that which is completed. A subtle
sweetness mingled with the sadness of their fate. They were filled with
the quiet serenity of despair.

"It's devilish pretty," said the Colonel, looking about him. "I always
had an idea that I should like to die in a real, good, yellow London
fog. You couldn't change for the worse."

"I should have liked to have died in my sleep," said Sadie. "How
beautiful to wake up and find yourself in the other world! There was a
piece that Hetty Smith used to say at the college, 'Say not good-night,
but in some brighter world wish me good-morning.'"

The Puritan aunt shook her head at the idea. "It's a terrible thing to
go unprepared into the presence of your Maker," said she.

"It's the loneliness of death that is terrible," said Mrs. Belmont. "If
we and those whom we loved all passed over simultaneously, we should
think no more of it than of changing our house."

"If the worst comes to the worst, we won't be lonely," said her husband.
"We'll all go together, and we shall find Brown and Headingly and Stuart
waiting on the other side."

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. He had no belief in survival after
death, but he envied the two Catholics the quiet way in which they took
things for granted. He chuckled to think of what his friends in the Cafй
Cubat would say if they learned that he had laid down his life for the
Christian faith. Sometimes it amused and sometimes it maddened him, and
he rode onwards with alternate gusts